Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Anthony Marra Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Anthony Marra
Photo: Smeeta Mahanti

Anthony Marra

How to pronounce Anthony Marra: First syllable of last name rhymes with bar

Anthony Marra Biography

Anthony Marra is the New York Times bestselling author of The Tsar of Love and Techno and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, winner of the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and longlisted for the National Book Award.



This bio was last updated on 06/08/2022. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Interview

Anthony Marra and Amor Towles discuss Marra's Mercury Pictures Presents and the real-world events and family history that inspired it.

A Conversation Between Anthony Marra and Amor Towles

Amor Towles: Tony, can you start by giving us a brief overview of the novel?

Anthony Marra: Frank Lloyd Wright once said that if you tip the world on its side, all the loose pieces will land in Los Angeles. This was never more true than it was in the 1930s and '40s, when thousands of European émigrés and exiles landed in LA. Many ended up working at the margins of Hollywood. You had internationally renowned playwrights like Bertolt Brecht, who struggled to churn out B-movie potboilers. You had German Jewish actors who, because of their accents, could only find work portraying the very Nazis they thought they had escaped. This community of exiles became foundational to the US movie propaganda apparatus during the war, even though, as citizens of Axis-aligned countries, they were branded enemy aliens and denied the very rights and freedoms that their movies championed.

This is the broader world of Mercury Pictures Presents. And its story is about how such an unlikely group of people arrived to such an unlikely place and ended up transforming American culture.

I wanted to investigate this community through the perspective of a character named ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Books by this Author

Books by Anthony Marra at BookBrowse
Mercury Pictures Presents jacket The Tsar of Love and Techno jacket A Constellation of Vital Phenomena jacket
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Anthony Marra but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

We recommend 31 similar authors


Non-members can see 2 results. Become a member
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

More Anagrams

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.